Thanks for pointing that out, James; I'd missed it. And congratulations to Mr. Kittens for being the first to upset one of my high scores. Double congratulations for doing it on "Bones"; that's one of my favorite levels in the "no moving objects, but many of the stationary ones start off bigger than you" category, and I thought my high score in it was pretty solid.

However, I've now experimented and found a slightly different strategy for "Bones", allowing me to reclaim the number one slot. Keep those challenges coming!

High scores reconquered. That includes the dino levels, as well as the "Lab Rats and Lab Cats" and "Hippos and Houses" scores you tried to sneak past me. (Congratulations on defeating my old "Hippos and Houses" score, by the way; I'd thought it was one of my more solid ones. I shudder to think what's going to happen when you start attacking my relatively weak scores.)

Are you planning to crush my Egyptian scores the way you did my Dino scores? I hope you will; this is a more exciting challenge than just getting the gold medals was.

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I can't you believe you beat all my scores

Aside from "Mr. Kittens", which other names on the high scores list are yours? Or should we assume that the gold medal times are roughly based on your high scores during beta-testing?

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I think that the static object levels are good for high scores because there is no randomness.

Out of curiosity, why'd you decide to have randomness on the moving-parts levels? I'm sure it wouldn't have been hard to set up a constant seed so they played consistently each time.

Aside from "Mr. Kittens", which other names on the high scores list are yours? Or should we assume that the gold medal times are roughly based on your high scores during beta-testing?

Picard and Miles were either me or Kris. I believe those are from when we were figuring out medal times, but we didn't submit all of our times.

Btw, Gold medal times were usually determined by taking the average of a few playthroughs (and sometimes adding some extra time). I purposefully made them easier than Tasty Planet 1 because I wanted people to have a chance at unlocking everything. Also, I figured that high scores would provide a challenge for players who manage to get all golds.

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Out of curiosity, why'd you decide to have randomness on the moving-parts levels? I'm sure it wouldn't have been hard to set up a constant seed so they played consistently each time.

I didn't necessarily consider randomness a bad thing and I didn't think that I could eliminate anyways so I didn't try to. Yes, seeding the emitters would have made some of the levels less random. Perhaps I should have done that. However, there would still be other sources of randomness (the players movements effecting the AI routines, plus the caps on maximum emitted entities depending on what gets eaten) so things would still devolve into an unpredictable state... Fortunately randomness isn't necessarily bad for high scores, there are plenty of popular high score games that have randomness (that's why people are still competing for Donkey Kong high scores).

I've defeated your scores again, albeit some of them just barely; this is getting increasingly challenging. I had to adopt a new strategy for "Cow Crossing", and my strategies for "Feast" and "Roman Rats" have been pushed to their limits.

There are a few levels that I put a lot of effort into, but still couldn't couldn't beat your time... I'm really curious how you got that time on Fast Cats, for example - it seems to me that there is only one strategy - I designed the level that way! But I'm still almost 2 seconds behind your time!

Oh dear. I just played through "Fast Cats" again and then watched your gold medal video to compare, and your strategy is the same as mine; what's different is the behavior of the mice. Mine are getting stuck and clumping up at about 11-o-clock in their respective circles, which is saving me some time--especially at the end of the level.

I experimented with different options: details or not, full screen or not, etc., but nothing changed the mice's behavior. I'm running version 10.0.4 of the game, but I dug 10.0.1 out of my trash and the mice were behaving that way even back then.

I went back and looked at other levels with enemies moving in a pattern, and none of them have the enemies bumping into one another without player interaction--even ones like "Clones", where the enemies are following looping patterns, are fine. It's something specific to "Fast Cats"--but happening on all four mouse paths of "Fast Cats", at approximately the same spot on each path.

I've been enjoying fighting for high scores--I hope this is the only one where I've had an unfair advantage. (And I hope you can find a way to fix the problem, and somehow delete my unfair score from both the high score server and my save file. )

Ahhh, I see. Yes, the rats aren't set up correctly in that level - they are supposed to be looping around a path but the "loop" variable isn't turned on for them. I can reproduce the same behavior on one of my Macs. I'm still investigating why the behavior is so different on the different computers.

In any case I should have this fixed soon, and I'll also add some checks so the high scores will be fixed. I believe the problem is unique to this level.